Asking for Money

While responding to my local public radio station’s fund drive last week, I thought of writing a post about the challenges faced by non-profits and charitable organizations, including spiritual services, asking for financial support.

I receive much thoughtful news commentary listening to National Public Radio and occasionally reference their reports on this blog, so I feel happily obliged to contribute to their services.  But I doubt if churches could “get away with” dispensing with regular programming to devote their time to fundraising.

Of course, there is plenty of fundamentalist, evangelical, and/or prosperity gospel religious programming that does, a point that John Oliver has recently hilariously ridiculed on his HBO show by establishing a faux church named, “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption.”

But those of us on the progressive end of the religious spectrum tend to be more circumspect about much needed financial support. Perhaps that’s why some progressive religious blogs have paid subscriptions, but this blog has never required donations for access. Nor has it allowed advertising on the site, and there is no remuneration for sales of recommended books or use of its posts on other blogs.

When I served West Hollywood Presbyterian Church, many of us went to brunch after Sunday services. Once, while we were gathering money to pay our collective bill, I mischievously joked, “If only we could get this much in the offering plate!”

“But we don’t get fed at church,” one person remarked, to which I responded, “You don’t?”

At the time, the church was part of Pacific Presbytery, and many a time, both during presbytery meetings and when I served on its committee overseeing candidates for professional ministry, I witnessed seminarians transferring into the Presbyterian Church without seeming to change their fundamentalist, evangelical background beliefs, and I cynically wondered if it was because Presbyterian ministers are paid better than most.

MCC, the denomination that ordained me ten years ago, does not have the material resources of longstanding mainstream denominations, yet I have witnessed its pastors serve their congregations with zeal, despite frequently being underpaid. A common joke among the clergy is that one has to be partnered with someone with a “real job” to survive.

A churchwoman once told me that she was well into adulthood before she realized pastors were paid!

Fall is the time congregations usually have their stewardship drives. The end of the year is when charitable groups and other non-profits seek our donations.

I urge you to take these requests to heart.

And I invite you to consider a tax-deductible donation to this blog.

Blessedly, my “church” overhead is low—I don’t have a sanctuary to support or multiple employees. Ten per cent of your contributions (beyond credit card charges) goes to MCC in gratitude for its oversight, not only of contributions, but of how this emerging ministry does its work. I write an annual report, documenting what I’ve done during each calendar year, and pay an annual ministerial credential fee, as an “authorized, active, and accountable” MCC ministry.

Collectively, your congregation might consider putting “Progressive Christian Reflections” as a line item in your mission budget, because this blog serves as an outreach to progressive Christians in unsupportive congregations as well as those beyond the church.

But only do so if you believe you or someone “out there” is being fed spiritually by these reflections.

Gratefully,

Chris

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Several posts referencing NPR are on the link in the second paragraph. Additional posts referencing local public radio can be found by clicking here.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Summer Christmas

The thought behind last week’s post, “Hevel Happens,” was confirmed by our delivery system sending it to subscribers a day late! Sorry!

I thought of writing this and posting around Christmas, but I am so overcome with something like a convert’s zeal that I can’t wait till then, even though each year summer’s end has the lowest ebb in terms of blog visitors who are not subscribers.  Earlier this season, for example, we enjoyed over 4000 monthly visitors but are now shy of 3000.  So I invite you to share this link/post with as many people as possible!

What excites me is yet another chapter in William P. Brown’s Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World: “Incarnational Wonder,” based on Gospel writer John’s prologue, the first eighteen verses of chapter one. See last week’s post on a different chapter.

What I “got” from it goes a bit beyond Brown’s actual elucidation of this text, though not beyond its implications. I suddenly understood that the “mystery” of Christmas (though of course mystery by its very definition can never be understood, only “wondered” at) is that early Christians finally “got” that God was in the world, in earth, in its creatures and in its matter, and in us—our very DNA.

And this is a tenet that we skeptical, doubting, deconstructionist, demythologizing, progressive Christians may affirm without reservation, I believe. 

“In the beginning was the word [logos].” … Typically translated “Word,” logos comes from Greek Stoic philosophy and refers to the structuring principle of the universe that makes all life possible. … Call it God’s Grand Unifying Principle (aka GUP). But Logos in John is more than a formal abstraction, more than a grand unified theory of everything as pursued by physicists (aka GUT). No, the Logos is embodied. 

The reason I write that my “ah-hah” may go a little beyond Brown’s interpretation is that I believe that, instead of this being the moment at which God entered the cosmos, entered the earth, inhabited “dirt”—that rather, this was the moment when we realized God’s essence or organizing principle or divine life was always incarnated in creation. That may be Brown’s intent as well.

I’ve written in an earlier post that the mystic Hildegard of Bingen believed that the Incarnation was not a result of “The Fall” or sin, but was intended by God from the beginning of Creation.

Physicists and theologians are engaged in similar tasks, discerning and discovering the “structuring principle of the universe that makes all life possible.” Scientists might say theologians are relying on “supernatural” phenomena or beliefs, when the Incarnation might mean there is nothing supernatural about God—that God is as “natural” and integral to the cosmos as we are.

Does that discount a “personal” God? It surely discounts a tribal, nationalistic, or parochial deity, but reveals a deity to be found in our very DNA, our skin, flesh, blood, eggs, sperm, tears, and bones—what could be more personal than that? And that we would attribute to that deity our highest values—love, compassion, justice, equality, shalom, and good stewardship—such as equal distribution of the world’s goods, care for “the least of these,” and respect for our environment—to name a few of those values, touches our deepest felt needs and lifts us to our highest aspirations, and it could be said, those of God.

Process theology posits a God that includes the cosmos, making in effect everything we can see, touch, hear, smell, and taste God’s “body.” Thus God is the ultimate altruist, sharing divine life sacrificially and universally, exemplified in Jesus of Nazareth’s living and dying for others, inviting his followers do the same. That is the path to resurrection, to new life, to new possibilities, to re-creation. Later in the book, Brown explains in his chapter, “Consummated Wonder,” that Revelation is about the earth’s renewal, not rapture, through God’s indwelling presence.

Brown notes that John affirms the darkness cannot overcome the light that is the life of the world and uses “a surprising word for God’s full-bodied embrace of creaturely existence, [that] has little to do with limitation: ‘fullness’ or pleroma in Greek (1:16). It is from God’s outward-extending abundance, from God’s pleroma that God becomes enfleshed. Divine pleroma is like an aroma that fills a room, like the costly ointment Mary used to anoint Jesus’ feet… Or like God’s glory, which ‘filled the tabernacle’…”

These thoughts should make for us the merriest of Christmases!

Related posts:

A Theory of Everything

A Single Unified Force

The Universe in Your Soul

To see my posts that have been re-posted on progressivechristianity.org, click here.

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.